StoryTelling Dice

If you are anything like me you will walk around shops a bit like a teaching magpie thinking, ooh that will come in handy at some point in my teaching career. I’ll buy it!

Then you end up with a drawer full of rainy day activities and stuff that you one day aim to use in your lessons, sometimes your not quite sure how.

This is how I came about buying some “Storytelling Dice” from Tiger. Tiger is a weird and wonderful shop full of inspiration for lessons, I have got some wonderful things from here over the years.

I bought these dice and left them in my drawer not quite working out how or when I was going to use them. Then the other day it hit me. We had been learning about creation stories for a while with S1 pupils, we had looked at Inuit, Egyptian, Dreamtime, Adam and Eve, Big Bang Theory, Ancient Celts. As the S1 progressed through the topic we were constantly engaging in discussions comparing and contrasting the different stories and analysing what they mean.

The S1 class have now become an S2 class but I felt we still had a lot to cover with this topic and use our skills so what I did was I had the pupils in their home groups. (There will be an upcoming post on Co-Operative Learning) and gave each home group one of the dice, I had 7 home groups and 6 of the storytelling dice, however I do also have a ‘blank’ dice, the you can write on it whiteboard marker. I therefore got 6 pupils to name 6 random objects. Wah Lah! 7 Story telling dice. (This was a present from my like-minded magpie mother, I think she also got it in Tiger)

The groups had to roll the dice, write down the picture they saw and pass it on. One thing i did notice was some groups were rolling the same image, but saw different things. E.g. One of the images was an open book, some said it was a book but another group got the same image and said it was a bible. Again this all builds into our learning about how many people can interpret the same thing or story in a multitude of ways!

The pupils have now been tasked with creating a video using their 7 items with the focus being Creation! Some have chosen creation of one thing, others have chosen creation of the world and universe. They stories all sound weird and wonderful and it’s brilliant to tap into our young peoples imagination and creativity before they ‘grow up’ and lose it.